Adobe Lightroom Tip of the Week

Q: I’ve attached a new external hard drive to my computer and want to move my past images to it, but Lightroom doesn’t recognize the drive.

A: I’ve gotten this question a bunch so I thought I would post the answer here as I’m sure many others have run into the same thing. Here’s the deal… your hard drive files and folders show up in the FOLDERS module in Lightroom. However, these are only folders and drives that Lightroom has been introduced to. You can have 10 drives on your computer but if you haven’t told Lightroom about them, they will not show up in the Library module under FOLDERS. Here are the steps to get Lightroom to recognize a new external (or internal) drive so that you can move images to a new hard drive. REMEMBER… any time you want to move images on your hard drive, you MUST do it from within Lightroom or you will end up with question marks all over your library as Lightroom won’t know where they reside.

Please any image on the new drive through Explorer or Finder. Doesn’t matter what it is or whether it’s a JPG, TIFF, PSD or RAW file. Any image.

Import that image into Lightroom through your import module

Now that you’ve imported an image from that drive, Lightroom will now show this drive under the FOLDERS listing in the Library Module.

Now you can drag any folder listed in Lightroom to your new drive. My recommendation is to create a master folder called PHOTOGRAPHS and then drag all the folders from your FOLDERS list that you want on that new drive into this new master folder. If you have master folders (such as by year), you can drag the entire folder into the new drive and the subfolders will follow.